"More than 100,000 applications have now been published in the Windows Phone Marketplace and new content is currently being added at the rate of 313 applications per day. At the time of writing, 100,145 applications have been published. Of these, 26,493 were added in the last three months and 9,391 were added in the last month. These applications come from just over 23,825 different publishers." Is there anybody out there who still places any value on these numbers, whether they be for Android, iOS, or WP7? Considering virtually all Android, iOS, and WP7 applications are useless, ugly, buggy crap (with only a few being somewhat tolerable - never actually good, because good software doesn't exist), I honestly don't really care. But hey, another check mark on the list of PR talking points.

What's 100,000 apps compared to the millions for Android and iOS? They're way, way behind.

The other question is whether it is sustainable. If those 23,000 publishers are not finding much benefit from the Windows AppStore, then they probably won't follow up with more applications, and the number will plateau if they don't get more publishers.

All said, there's not enough WinPhone/WP7 devices out there to really make it worth it for publishers - each user would have to purchase several apps regularly for them to break even, which users are not necessarily included to do on average, let alone all of them.

The quality of WP apps is sadly behind iOS ones (don't have an Android phone), but then again it's early days and these apps will get updates and improve.

That the number of apps is increasing does show that there is a healthy developer interest.

Personally I don't care that much for the hardware specifications, much more important are the apps. They give a mobile device most of its effective use. I have both an iPhone 4 and a Lumia 800 and I miss a number of apps on the Lumia, making the iPhone much more useful.

I just wish there were some consistency. WP7 is an amazing phone platform, and the few apps that actually follow the Metro design rules really shine on the OS. The thousands that are either bad ports of iOS/Android apps, or otherwise seem cobbled together from a traditional desktop point of view, do nothing but detract from the usability built into the OS.

I'd say one of the best examples of a great WP7 app is Microsoft's own Office. I absolutely abhor MS Office on the desktop, but using the WP7 version is pure bliss. It's as if Microsoft decided they wanted all their workflow experts to concentrate on WP7, and chose that app as their flagship design example.

On the other side you have the thousands of games that are a UI nightmare. I understand that not every game can follow Metro UI concepts, but at least put some thought into what you're doing. The worst offender is a game that I actually do enjoy despite my frustration: Legend of Descent. It's a Rogue-like graphical dungeon exploration game, and the interface seems to be a case of "hey I have all these extra features for this version, let's just keep stacking the already obtuse menu with even more crap!" It's enough to drive me away from the game lately.

I don't get the obsession with apps. What you need is functionality, and often the 'There's an app for that!' mentality just adds another way to consume more stuff. Which is, of course, an important reason why Apple is raking in money, and also why Microsoft is copying all the most annoying malfeatures of iOS. Some of the examples of 'great apps' I've seen just make me think: You need an app for that?!

I agree, certain functionality should be built into the OS instead of being left to the whims of the app developers. Things that sync like calendars, notes, to-do lists, RSS readers, and so on should be built in. Even esoteric things like LED flashlights and password managers should be a feature of the OS. You can always install a third party app if you don't like what the OS brings to the table, but you shouldn't be forced to go app-hunting for basic functionality.

Sadly though, mobile devices are seen as a cash cow for the people who design the OSes, and we will likely have to deal with "one app per task" for a while yet. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see future versions of Android and maybe even iOS that only have the dialer and app store as core software, with everything else a downloadable (and likely paid) app.

I have an app to access my bank account. In the 90s I had a PC app for it, which made a modem connection. Then a web interface came and I had to log in using some hardware device. Now I just enter a code in the app on the phone in my pocket (well, just after it left my pocket).

This is an app I don't think a device maker would or should install as default. Using the web interface is awkward.

Other stuff I use on my phone are Twitter and Facebook. Both free, just like the banking app and again not something I think should be included by default.

What's 100,000 apps compared to the millions for Android and iOS? They're way, way behind.

Seriously, it doesn't matter. Most people use a handful of apps (Facebook, Twitter, banking, finance, news) and a few games. Nearly all of the most essential apps are already present on the WP7 App Store. So, really, whether or not WP7 has XYZZY-New-App is irrelevant.

"The user base of course does matter to developers, it's quite scary to think you could sell an app at 99 cents to all users (which you have zero chance of doing) and still not be *that* rich."

It's a painful admission, but it's looking like the glut of developers are scrounging for smaller and smaller pieces of the pie, the largest swaths of which only going to a small but immensely rich group at the top. This seems exceedingly similar to the music industry, where over half the tracks for sale don't get a single download. I'm really upset that I can't find the full source anymore.

http://blog.jinni.com/2009/01/can-we-discover-value-in-the-long-tai...
"Reporting on a study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, a recent article in the Times Online claims that the long tail theory has been contradicted. The study found that “more than 10 million of the 13 million [music] tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Page
^ Patrick Foster (December 22, 2008). "Long Tail theory contradicted as study reveals 10m digital music tracks unsold: Digital sales figures dent niche market theory". The Times. "However, a new study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, the not-for-profit royalty collection society, suggests that the niche market is not an untapped goldmine and that online sales success still relies on big hits. They found that, for the online singles market, 80 per cent of all revenue came from around 52,000 tracks. For albums, the figures were even more stark. Of the 1.23 million available, only 173,000 were ever bought, meaning 85 per cent did not sell a single copy all year.".

http://williamjudd.com/2010/11/15/the-long-tail/
"researchers Will Page and Andrew Bud in 2008 showed that 80% of single sales came from just 52,000 tracks, suggesting an incredibly thin Long Tail. The same study also showed 85% of albums sold online didn’t sell a single copy."

The Times links are broken, it could be because they're behind paywalls?

Getting that much developer attention for such a niche platform is definitely a monumental achievement, MS at their best indeed. Watching the future of OS unravelling before our eyes just now is a fascinating experience.

a few years ago began hyping these kinds of numbers as the be-all and end-all, and so app count began being used in lame fanboy wars (see TemporalBeing's post above, for an example).

The sad fact is that a huge portion of mobile apps available for a given platform are garbage, and another huge portion consists of glorified RSS feeds. Some of the latter are actually quite nice (nicer than the corresponding RSS feed, mobile web page, or full web page), but how many of those is a user going to install? I saw an article yesterday where someone was speculating (or even advocating) that in the future the "web" as we know it would near-dissappear and everyone would use these mini-web apps to access the internet rather than browsers. I hope that doesn't happen. I don't want to install an "app" for every site I might want to browse.

THe current state of things is what you would expect to result from a system where apps sell for zero to five dollars. You get a huge number of cheap garbage or inconsequential fluff.

I saw an article yesterday where someone was speculating (or even advocating) that in the future the "web" as we know it would near-dissappear and everyone would use these mini-web apps to access the internet rather than browsers. I hope that doesn't happen. I don't want to install an "app" for every site I might want to browse.

I am looking forward to this.

Developing web applications just sucks, with the mixture of CSS, HTML, Javascript trying to bend the browser to provide a proper environment across versions and operating systems.

Web applications are just glorified teletypes.

Personally, given the choice, I'll always use native over web applications.

The whole app count seems to be apps ecosystem version of megapixel race. I can't talk about WP7 but from my limited experience with Android, the app number in no way seems to translate to actual quality of the software products I encounter (by chance or after deliberate search).
The question is why hasn't any better metrics to compare ecosystems emerged?
My ideas:
- compare ratings of the same apps
- count apps that propose somewhat unique approach ,
- count apps (services in general) that are established in one ecosystem and and missing elsewhere.

That would be be probably quite quickly manipulated by "fans" of each platform - or even also by armies of their active detractors (I don't think that getting some old device(s?), just to mess with the ratings, would be a stretch to them); a war, overall
Maybe funny at first, but still a mess.

Actually, now I wonder - how many of filler apps were already submitted basically just to up the numbers of "darling" platform?

- count apps that propose somewhat unique approach ,

Who will determine what is unique? (plus, really, such valuation kinda promotes patenting of ideas)

- count apps (services in general) that are established in one ecosystem and and missing elsewhere.

Hard to not find equivalents to pretty much anything...

I don't think there's any easy way out of this mess; we didn't really figure it out on the PC side, before - but I guess just like on the PC, we'll mostly just have small dominating "core" group of apps and games.